Tobacco.org

• Tobacco case set to resume Monday  

The trial on claims by the state of Vermont that R.J. Reynolds Co. misled consumers about the health risks of smoking a new kind of cigarette resumes Monday at Chittenden Superior Court in Burlington after a two-month hiatus.

The state, which is arguing the case on behalf of 36 states, contends that Reynolds has marketed Eclipse, a cigarette that heats rather than burns tobacco, as safer than conventional cigarettes despite having no scientific evidence to back its advertising claims.

Judge Dennis Pearson presided over 20 days of testimony in the case in October and, in a ruling late last month, said he will allow Reynolds five more days to wrap up its defense against the state's claims.

Based on recent court filings, Reynolds lawyers intend to focus part of this week's testimony on an 11-year-old statement by the Attorney General's Office that criticized the company for not doing more to promote Premier, another "safer" cigarette it had developed.

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Victoria bans battery powered cigarettes 

Battery powered cigarettes that give pseudo smokers a hit of nicotine vapour have been banned in Victoria.

The devices resemble a traditional cigarette and contain nicotine cartridges that create puffs of vapour through an atomiser, like smoke.

From Thursday, the sale and use of nicotine cartridges will be illegal in Victoria and the advertising of battery powered cigarettes banned.

Health Minister Daniel Andrews said nicotine was highly addictive and toxic and was rapidly absorbed through the skin, inhalation and ingestion.

He said users of battery powered cigarettes were in danger of nicotine poisoning, with acute exposure causing possible damage to the mouth, eyes and nervous, digestive and musculoskeletal systems.

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• Ban on battery-powered smokes 

A battery-powered device touted as the "healthy alternative to smoking" has been banned by the State Government.

Health Minister Daniel Andrews today said it would be illegal to sell the nicotine cartridges necessary to use the device.

The device, which resembles a traditional cigarette, does not contain tobacco but delivers nicotine through an atomiser that creates puffs of vapour similar to cigarette smoke.

Health organisations were outraged earlier this year when the cigarettes were promoted as a way to beat smoking bans in pubs, offices and on public transport.

Mr Andrews said the pharmacology of nicotine had been well studied.

"It is addictive and produces a characteristic abstinence withdrawal syndrome," he said in a statement. . . .

The new regulation, which comes into effect tomorrow, outlaws the manufacture, sale, supply, purchase, possession or use of unregulated nicotine delivery systems.

The decision will have no effect on the sale of nicotine replacement therapies, which are used to assist people stop smoking.

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Ban on battery-powered cigarettes  

BATTERY-powered cigarettes, sold as a "healthier alternative" and a way to beat smoking bans, will be outlawed in Victoria from Friday.

Distributors say electronic cigarettes have been used by up to 10,000 Victorians since they hit the market a year ago.

The Egar device works by heating up a small cartridge of liquid nicotine, releasing puffs of vapour resembling smoke that are inhaled by smokers.

But because the lookalike product is not lit, it can be used in "no smoking" areas.

It contains no tobacco, but Health Minister Daniel Andrews says its nicotine is no less toxic and addictive.

From tomorrow, it will be illegal to sell the nicotine cartridges used in the device in Victoria.

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New Crown7 Device Allows Smokers to Puff Without Smoke 

Crown7.com, the global leader in electronic cigarettes, announced today its launch of the HYDRO product line representing the most advanced e-cigarette on the market. The HYDRO is sleek and sexy and the same size as a traditional 100 length cigarette; however it is smokeless and does not contain any tar or carcinogens.

In response to global smoking bans, the Crown7 product allows bars, restaurants, casinos and other businesses where smoking is now banned, to retain loyal customers they would otherwise lose.

The Crown7 HYDRO looks and acts like a cigarette without the harmful side effects of traditional cigarettes. The HYDRO replicates the act of smoking using a nicotine cartridge, a microchip and a water vapor mist. When the user inhales through the tip, the battery-powered microchip activates an atomizer which provides small amounts of nicotine with each inhalation, and instead of unhealthy smoke a harmless water vapor mist is dispersed.

"If it (Crown7 HYDRO) doesn't contain any tobacco, it would not be prohibited since the law is designed to protect workers and others from the harmful effects of secondhand tobacco smoke," said Celina De Leon at New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene.

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• Tobacco 'orbs' melt in mouth 

The release this January of the first dissolvable tobacco product by a major company has some public health officials concerned.

"This is a wake-up call for the public health community," says Gregory Connolly of Harvard School of Public Health. "It's a total sea change."

For smokers who can't light up in the office or at a restaurant, a new aspirin-sized tablet, called "Camel Orb," will let tobacco melt in their mouth. The dissolvable product -- arriving January in stores in Portland, Ore., Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis -- is the first such product by a major tobacco company and is part of a booming market in smokeless alternatives to cigarettes as smoke-free laws sweep the nation.

"It's meeting the needs of smokers," says Rob Dunham, of R.J. Reynolds, maker of Orb and Camel cigarettes. With lozenge-like Orb, he says there's no smoke, no spit, no litter. . . .

"These products are designed to enhance social acceptability of tobacco," says Connolly. "They've left the realm of traditional tobacco products" and are more akin to food. He says they may pose fewer health risks than cigarettes because they are smokeless, but he says they're dangerous because they keep people addicted. Also, he says, they're attractive to kids, because they're easy to hide.

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LETTER: Tobacco research has its place 

Re: "Universities fail the test," by Les Hagen, Letters, Dec. 11.

Les Hagen has followed a common approach of narrow-minded special interest groups, creating a "report card" to measure how much others obey their demands. In this case, they demand that universities prohibit research that is funded by tobacco companies, and thereby abandon their most cherished ethic, academic freedom. What Hagen does not tell us is that this is done to protect his extremist political agenda from competing ideas.

Hagen's complaints about the industry are outdated, as are his anti-tobacco tactics. Most of the new and promising ideas for substantially reducing the health effects from smoking and nicotine use are coming from the industry itself.

As a recipient of one of the research grants Hagen condemns, I work to tell smokers who are not quitting that they can still reduce their risks by 99 per cent by switching to smokeless tobacco or other low-risk sources of nicotine (see TobaccoHarmReduction.org for details).

This is perhaps the greatest untapped public health measure available in our society. . . .

Those of us in public health want to help people. But anti-tobacco extremists would rather just punish smokers with high taxes and other regulations, as well as by letting them die.

By trying to persuade or blackmail universities into cutting off research they do not approve of, Hagen and his friends hope to keep smokers from learning there are low-risk alternatives.

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More letters 

LETTER: SHATENSTEIN: Smokeless not an option 

It is staggering to hear Carl V. Phillips speak of the "most cherished ethic" of universities. Prof. Phillips is funded by the U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company, the leading smokeless firm in a tobacco industry bereft of ethics. How can a researcher supported by a business that profits from the suffering and death of its customers ever dare to criticize Les Hagen, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, a group dedicated to alleviating the immeasurable harm caused by tobacco use?

In a hypothetical world where all smokers would give up cigarettes and switch to smokeless products, there is no doubt they would suffer less disease and fewer premature deaths. But we do not live in that hypothetical world.

How can anyone encourage the uptake of an addictive product whose use leads to grossly higher incidence of pancreatic and throat and mouth cancers?

Even if smokeless products are safer on paper, Big Tobacco fools smokers into resisting the temptation to quit by assuring them they'll have something to chew on "for those times when you can't light up."

It's easy for Phillips to try to marginalize Hagen and ASH by speaking of extremism, but what is more radical, what is more on the margins of society, then to work for or be supported by an industry that knowingly sickens and kills its customers?

If Phillips really cared about the "hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in North America," he wouldn't be so interested in getting smokers to trade one poison for another -- a safer poison, but poison nonetheless. He would be out there working with ASH, not mocking its efforts.

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• The “Green” Cigarette?  

According to the Southeast Farm Press, organic tobacco is “the biggest growth area in US tobacco production.” The stuff fetches about twice the price as regular tobacco on the open market. “Any tobacco without pesticide residues is more attractive than conventional in the current market,” said organic tobacco producer Micou Browne.

Browne's company, Organic Smoke Inc., bought twice as much leaf in the past year. But that won’t be even half as much as what the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co., makers of the additive-free Natural American Spirit brand cigarettes, grew. Already the largest organic tobacco product manufacturer, Santa Fe continues to see its sales grow by more than 10 percent each year. . . .

The mass consumption of cigarettes, which is increasing globally by slightly more than one percent a year, can only be met through the exhaustion of natural resources, environments, and labor. Big companies like Reynolds American, which owns RJR and is itself 42 percent owned by British American Tobacco and manufactures about one of every three cigarettes sold in the US, tend to buy cheap leaf from developing countries where farm practices are lax and tobacco-control efforts are more easily suppressed.

In fact, by 2010 a projected 87 percent of tobacco will be grown in developing countries like South Korea, where more than 40 percent of annual deforestation is due to the production and curing of tobacco; Brazil, where pesticide sprayings have polluted fresh water; and Malawi, which has the highest incidence of child labor in Southern Africa (tobacco farms in Malawi that have a contract with multinationals, about 20 percent of the total, have a ban on child labor). . . .

In a paper McDaniel had published last year on smokers’ perceptions of “natural” cigarettes, she concluded that “tobacco companies may be inclined to introduce natural brands as part of their burgeoning corporate social responsibility efforts” and that “such efforts may involve expanding the current concept of natural cigarettes, with their emphasis on no additives, into 'green' cigarettes—organic (pesticide-free), completely biodegradable, or manufactured using renewable energy.” Indeed, market research shows that informing smokers of the chemical contents of most cigarettes results in shock and alarm, and also suggests that, for many smokers, this alarm can be allayed by a “natural” cigarette. In Germany, ads for “organic” cigarettes have been banned because regulators there decided they mislead consumers into thinking they're a healthier product.

Like a subliminal message, the soothing words of the environmental movement have become powerful enough to override the proven negative health effects of cigarettes and the government-mandated warning label. There's some sense of trust and reassurement hearing a company say, as Santa Fe does on its website, “Supporting sustainable agriculture is part of our commitment to reducing our footprint on the Earth, and protecting our natural resources.” But McDaniel points to a “need to expand our definition of sustainable. It’s all well and good to grow something organically and use renewable energy sources, but if it kills half the people who use it then it’s not very sustainable.”

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RODU: Dissolvables: Saving the lives of cigarette smokers  

I am a professor of medicine, and I hold an endowed chair in tobacco harm reduction research, at the University of Louisville. I read with interest your commentary on Camel dissolvables. Unfortunately, your commentary contains statements that are false and misleading.

You characterized Camel dissolvables as "...still addictive and risky like cigarettes..." This is patently untrue. Scientific research has established that smokeless tobacco products are at least 98% safer than smoking. You have repeated the misinformation from government agencies and by anti-tobacco extremists about the relative safety of smokeless products. . . .

The 100,000 Oregonians who will die from smoking-related illness in the next 20 years are not children today; they are adults, 35 years and older. Preventing youth access to tobacco is vitally important, but that effort should never be used as a smokescreen to condemn smoking parents and grandparents to premature death.

If any other consumer product was as dangerous as cigarettes, The Oregonian would demand safer alternatives, and it would be scandalous if consumers were denied them. American smokers are literally dying for ways to step away from the fire, and they deserve accurate information about -- and access to -- effective, safer smokeless substitutes.

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• Pilot Corp. Stores Offer Ruyan Smoking Alternatives in Knoxville, Tenn.-Area Convenience Stores 

Ruyan America, Inc., Minneapolis, announced that its Ruyan Vegas(R) E-cigar, an award-winning smokeless cigarette substitute, is now available in Pilot Food Mart stores in the Knoxville, Tenn. region.

The Ruyan Vegas looks and feels like a premium cigar, five and one-half inches in length with a circumference of approximately 50 ring size. The Ruyan Vegas uses a microchip, airflow sensor, ultrasonic atomizer and nicotine-infused liquid to produce a vapor that provides its user with the experience of smoking, without producing dangerous second hand smoke and without endangering the health of associates or bystanders. The Ruyan Vegas has approximately 1800 mouthfuls of vapor, nearly the equivalent vapor to the mouthfuls of smoke produced in a carton of conventional cigarettes and is meant to be disposed of after it ceases to produce vapor. Smokers who use it to replace all of their smoking activity report it lasts as long as a carton of cigarettes, while smokers who only use it in places where they cannot or would not smoke report it lasts anywhere from three to six weeks. Pilot stores expect to offer the product at a low introductory price of $29.99, a real bargain when compared to the traditional alternatives.

"We have seen the research from Ruyan America and believe that this is going to be an exciting alternative to smoking that does not emit second hand smoke," stated Dan Fleming, Pilot VP of Operations.

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• Safer cigarette smoke just as harmful to embryos 

Smoke from so-called harm-reduction cigarettes is just as dangerous to developing embryos as smoke from standard cigarettes, and may be even more toxic, new experiments with mouse embryo stem cells show.

The smoke issuing from the ends of these cigarettes is more harmful than the fumes inhaled through a filter, Dr. Prue Talbot of the University of California, Riverside and her colleagues report in the journal Human Reproduction.

There has been very little research on the chemicals remaining in cigarettes treated to remove certain toxic and cancer-causing substances and even less on how smoke from these cigarettes might affect developing embryos, Talbot told Reuters Health. "The caveat is there are many things in smoke besides the known carcinogens -- smoke has somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 chemicals in it," she said.

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• Possibility grows for FDA regulation  

Even if Altria Group Inc.'s research efforts on that front are successful, the parent company of cigarette-maker Philip Morris USA and cigar-maker John Middleton Inc. will need an independent stamp of approval to make any health claims about new products.

That is where the Food and Drug Administration could come into play.

Public-health groups believe 2009 could finally be the year when Congress grants the FDA authority to regulate the tobacco industry.

"We're optimistic that Congress will take up the FDA bill early in the next year," said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. FDA legislation passed the House by a wide margin this summer, but it was held up in the Senate, where it faced more opposition.

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• Special report: Philip Morris research requires constant tests, tweaks  

Philip Morris wants smokers to try new things -- but they're a tough group to convince.

Just this year, Philip Morris pulled the silvery packs of its Marlboro UltraSmooth cigarettes from store shelves in Atlanta, Salt Lake City and Tampa, Fla., after a three-year effort to test a complicated new filter.

It gave up a few years back on an electric smoking device, called Accord, that it test-marketed here.

Now the tobacco giant's main active test-marketing effort is on smokeless tobacco -- products you put in your mouth instead of lighting up -- in what health advocates fear is an effort to recruit a new generation of nicotine addicts.

While researchers at Philip Morris's Center for Research & Technology in downtown Richmond still are working hard on re-engineering cigarettes, the toxic chemistry of burning tobacco isn't the only hurdle they face.

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